The article compares some core aspects of Enactivism (REC version) with Ecological Psychology (on the basis that Fultot et al. reflects it), they find disagreement and puts forth a decision between two aspects of EP -one amenable to REC, the other not. The one that isn’t is thankfully not a position held by EP, which makes it seem like the two are compatible (at least on these points). See below for extracts. Finally: The below is an attempt at understanding each other better, I like Enactivism, I think we can mutually benefit each other -but we need to know each other’s positions better. Also, I am not a representative of the entire discipline, nor do I claim to know it. But, this is a beginning to a discussion across fields so we can benefit from each other! (I hope if I mischaracterize Enactivism that you will help me too!)

p. 1 “The first thesis essentially says that all forms of basic cognition are “concrete spatio-temporally extended patterns of dynamic interaction between organisms and their environment ” (Hutto & Myin 2013: 5).”
If you take this quote out of its context of an Enactivism paper, you would need to be citing Gibson (1966, 1979) here and Chemero (2009), as it is a very close definition to how the concept of Affordances is used in EP. I.e. it being a relation within and/or between organisms and environments (this language can be tightened up though if you want, like niche and habitat (Baggs & Chemero, 2018). This is good news, because if it is a central tenet then there is hope we have amenable approaches.

p. 2 “Sensorimotor contingencies are the lawful ways in which sensory stimulation changes as the organism moves or acts in the environment . In perception the organism exploits these sensorimotor contingencies to find its way around the environment.”
I do not know the definition of sensory stimulation in Enactivism, if they mean the traditional behaviorist/representationalist sense that stimulation is the basis of perception, then I disagree. I believe this leads to a path down needing representations/content etc in the brain to build up whatever it is that we “see”. Due to Direct Perception, I cannot accept that. If they mean sensory stimulation the way that Gibson (1979) does, then the next point of issue is the exact definition of sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs) in general. Are SMCs the change in perspective? The change in perspective plus the change in layout that this brings with it? The change in all of the above plus the new changes in action that it also brings with it? The EP way of bringing about lawfulness is through specificity which can be found in Gibson (1979), Turvey, Solomon and Burton (1990), Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) and Chemero (2009) (and there are more…). Specificity is a debated term, what is included, what isn’t, but as a basic definition we need (in the case of vision) light that bounces off a bunch of stuff in the world, making it structured in different directions, this structure is referred to both as an ambient optic array, and information. Information here is not content. Never content. Ever. But with our visual perceptual system (which includes the entire body, not just the eyes) we have evolved to detect differences and changes in this structure. Information is argued by some to imply necessarily an animal, some don’t, yet others argue it doesn’t really matter if it does or not… For all that I can tell, the quoted sentence doesn’t contradict specificity…

p. 2 “However, from a REC point of view that interaction is always embodied interaction. It is the embodied nature of the organism that grounds the kind of interactions that are possible. Note however that the “body” referred to in the Embodiment Thesis is not our common-sense notion of body but rather the body engaged in non-linear and far-reaching sensorimotor interactions while engaging with certain salient features of the environment . In this interaction the physical body ànd brain areas are in play. ”
Gibson (1966, 1979) you cannot be disembodied. Some of the initial research in EP was driven by the idea that due to the definition of affordances, then our perception-action cycles must bear on aspects of our body in conjunction with aspects of the environment when we enact or perceive affordances. See Warren (1984) for an easy example. Lastly, for EP the brain surely does something, I won’t deny it is a curious structure that does something, but I definitely do not hold a modular view of the brain (see e.g. Anderson’s book After Phrenology about the specificity of brain regions). Now, this last point doesn’t necessarily contradict to Anderson, in that the brain does specific things, however, this to me (in both Anderson and REC) invites too easily the concept of representations if viewed strictly, or content if viewed loosely, as something in the brain, and that the brain does. That is not acceptable from an EP standpoint for very many different reasons. So, it does depend on what is actually meant by interaction, and what is supposed that the brain does, which isn’t explicitly stated in this quote.

p. 2 “All interactions are made possible by previous interactions between the organism and its environment (and recall that the history of interactions may extend beyond the organism’s life-time). ”
Question for Enactivists, I like the idea, if it doesn’t invite nativist arguments. How is it brought about across generations? (I can think of candidate answers but do not wish to speculate.)

p. 2 “The answer is that the interactions affect and change the neural and non-neural body of the organism. In the neural machinery the past experience is sedimented, and in order to explain current interactions this “sediment” is called upon.”
Another question, is REC ok with content either outside of or inside of the body, in whatever shape it takes? Ecological Psychology is not, for either, this to me hints at a real divide if content is assumed anywhere in the system on behalf of REC.

p. 2-3 “There is thus no danger that by invoking neural structure in enactivist explanation, representations slip back in by the back door.”
I want to apologize if I am reading REC unfavorably, but even though it is insisted upon that representations are not accepted in REC, it does seem like REC wants to talk about content without talking about representations. Is that true? Is that possible? If so, it hints again at a divide.

p. 3 “If the net of perception is so widely cast and is constituted by certain types of behavior by which organisms adapt to conditions in their environment, and if it is its aim to find in all these different kinds of behavior a kind of common structure as the essence of perception thus conceived, then it is unsurprising that perception does not depend on neural structure. One may wonder whether trying to find a communal structure to such a diverse set of behaviors is going to result in something genuinely explanatory.”
Firstly, ‘the essence of perception’ is not something that exists, it sounds representational/computational to me. A communal structure is slightly unclear what exactly is meant, I took it to mean that structure does things, but EP wouldn’t say that a structure does things. In fact, the way it is written makes me think it is referring to a fallacy not in EP but in representional/computational psychology due to the assumption of content. Structure, in EP, is of course implicated, but it is not the driver, it is not the controller -because there isn’t one.

p. 3 “Arguably, these are the phenomena for which REC invokes neural structure to explain them .”
This may be our currently dividing aspect, it’s not that neural structure is not involved, I of course think the brain is active, but I do not want to assign function to the brain if I don’t need to. So far, I haven’t come across any behavior, concept, situation, event, that I need to invoke content/representations/computation for. Maybe I will, and then that would be ok in certain forms, but I am going to try to explain things without the brain first, and if I can’t well then it may just be that ‘the brain does it’.

p. 4 “There is, at this point no reason to assume that the meaning of objects is in some way perceived by the organism . But EP makes the further assumption that the meaning is actually perceived through the perception of affordances. The way affordances are perceived is through the invariants in the optical array. The latter (as well as the ambient light at a convergence point) is said to contain (as in “content”) information about objects and their lay-out in the environment.”
Meaning is perceived in EP along with the relation between environment and organism, it is inherent in the term affordances. Since affordances (and the quote of Fultot) insists that ‘behavioral implications’ are what are important to the organism (for whatever reason, based on whatever past, current, and future that the organism is currently acting on). Content, it is never assumed in EP, there is no place for it. If some piece of writing seems to invite this idea, rest assured it is a misreading (or that it is really hard with the language we have at our disposal to say it in a different way that sounds better). Again, information is structure in an energy array, like the optic array in vision, which we can detect if we have perceptual systems sensitive to light (although it is deeper than this). Starting with Gibson (1966) is a good idea and then reading and noticing changes to his 1979 book. But there is a host of theorizing since then up until now also as a previous comment to a quote says (viz. specificity).

p. 4 “The use of the word “about” seems to indicate that information is a semantic notion and thus that information has semantic content.”
This made me think that perhaps the above, and this, hints at that this is a problem in philosophy -I’m a psychologist and I will throw around the word about or for interchangeably, in philosophy it seems to be a thing. Information does not have semantic content (however, see Michaels & Carello’s, 1981, about information about vs for). Content is not a concept in EP.

p. 4 “That Fultot et al. take this semantic road is far from clear, however, we suspect they do (cf. their complaint in § 51 that REC “doesn’t even tolerate content”).”
Fultot, just like me, aren’t representative of the entire field, although I of course understand that their article is the focus of Zahidi and Eemeren’s OPC. This statement, if true, doesn’t generalize to EP in general.

p. 4 “One way to do this is to interpret EP information as co-variance of worldly lay-out in relation to a convergence point and optical structure at that certain point .”
In comparison the the above quote, this one is closer to what you’d find in Gibson and authors after.

p. 4 “In other words, while the meaning of the objects is something objective (which we can, from a third-person perspective, describe), that meaning is not given in perception to the organism, it is something the organism enacts.”
Nothing is objective, objective and subjective doesn’t really exist. There is a commonly used Gibson quote that says that affordances cut across the subjective objective divide, it is both, or neither (1979). I take EP to include and couch behavior in culture, customs, norms, societies, groups, families, histories, futures… the list can be made long. We live in nested spatio-temporal scales. Of course, you can use words as if there is perspective such that, but in the reality of things, it is just a “pole of attention” (1979) and not some, actual, real, perspective that exists in the world. I think EP can give REC something here if my assumptions of REC aren’t too misguided.

p. 5 “For example, in order to avoid falling back on some “impoverished stimulus”-type of psychology, some ecological psychologists like Michael Turvey have swayed in the opposite direction, postulating ultra-information-richness of the media (light, air, …) around us. (cf. A. Chemero 2009: 106-107).”
“Ultra” richness is misleading, it just has a certain richness. EP does not say we perceive light as such when we go about our daily business, but, imagine the number of photons in certain cubic area -yeah it is super ultra amazing rich! But the point is that, we take it so for granted that we don’t realize that this is the norm. Impoverished stimulus is not. Light is incredibly dense, the pure physics of it checks out…

p. 5 “Here, the structure of the optical array determines completely the (behavioral) meaning of the object: there is no ambiguity possible . However, Rob Withagen and Anthony Chemero (2009) have challenged this view on evolutionary grounds.”
This is not exactly true, see Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) in their concept of the global array, and also see the reponses to their article (contained in the same pdf that the link directs to). The global array is a contested concept along with specificity, but it should give some insight into where the debate is. Also, there is ambiguity possible -but not in the traditional sense that would open up for arguing about impoverished stimulus- and also not only for evolutionary reasons, but for reasons you’ll find in Eleanor Gibson’s absolutely stunning theory of development within Ecological Psychology (e.g. Gibson & Pick, 2003). It really is a game-changer.

p. 5 “It merely allows for information available through the optic array to not fully specify affordances . That doesn’t imply a need for it to be supplemented through some type of mental construction. The organism can find out the affordances of the object by interacting with it . When the available (optic) invariant co-varies only moderately with the affordances, so to say, the history of interaction, c.q. learning history, explains the organism’s improved adjustment to its situation .”
Not fully specifying affordances gets tricky technically, other authors including myself, are skeptical about this, because it depends on where you think the consequence might “pop up” if we allow a 1-1-1 specificity (see Turvey, et al. 1990 above). As an example, finding out by interacting is a way of exploring the world for invariants -sometimes other invariants than the ones we first paid attention to that happened to be nonspecifying. See Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) for this, link further up. Finally, see Eleanor Gibson’s developmental theory, it does an excellent job of explaining learning history through differentiation.

p. 5 “With respect to the use of semantic notions, we have argued that these can be banned from EP without loss of explanatory power.”
This is good news because we don’t have anything called “semantic information” or “semantic notion” in our theory =D.

Over at 4e Cognition Group Anthony Chemero has given a talk (YouTube link) about a couple of interesting new directions that he and his students are working on for their dissertations and a paper. The main impetus is to explain “higher order cognition” through a rECS-able perspective.

The first turn is through Gui Sanches de Oliveira’s Artifactualism approach to models, essentially giving a thorough and solid argument for that scientific models are foremost tools, not accurate representations of the world. If it works, we use the model to predict, explain, plan, experiment, etc. It reminds me of the futile path that scientists often are found on: Focusing on finding The Truth, or finding objectivity. But the world seems to me to contain none, but even if it does, it doesn’t matter, at least not nearly as much as if the proposed model can be used in any applied setting. It reminds me of Nancy Cartwright’s arguments about truth and explanation, how far away those two concepts are from each other -and opting for truth takes us further away from a functioning tool. This is a really important step. Artifactualism rightfully criticizes the assumption that thoughtsare for representing the world accurately, and replaces it with that cognition is for toolmaking. “Explicit, occurrent thoughts are tools, instruments, or artifacts that some agents create and use. Of course, models can meet formal definitions of representations, but that is not what they are for…”.

The second turn is through Vicente Raja Galian’s attempt at defining brain activity through resonance and oscillators. In his case, TALONs as resonant networks of neurons that resonate to certain ecological information and not others, that can continue to oscillate in the absence of the initial resonate -and that can be set in oscillatory motion at a later point in time (again without the initial resonate, through Ed Large’s work). The brain here, is driven by everything else (not the opposite way around). Oscillators, and non-linear oscillators, can act as filters and produce patterns not in the original driver.

Then, we take a turn into what Chemero refers to as slave/master systems, and while those words seem very culturally loaded, they make the point that slave systems wander (drift) in absence of a master system. E.g. circadian rythms stay in tune when we are regularly exposed to sunlight, but when deprived, our rhythms start to drift. An idea connected to that when we do try and use TALONs to think about things, or the past, but because it is not what they (and as a whole, the brain) is for, we just don’t seem to be very good at it. Marek McGann adds “‘Memories’ are constructed on the fly, and confabulation is rife, because it is not retrieval of things, but it is temporary toolmaking”.

Ultimately these initial steps in making more concrete the idea of ‘resonance’, seems very promising. An interesting aspect of resonance, is that it exists on all scales, it doesn’t matter if we look at the behavioral or neural scale, which makes them analyzable by methods like fractals. It makes it an empirically testable theory. Also, with resonant networks, they no longer have to contain content -Anthony Chemero suggests tool-making which will have to be defined further for me to understand if representational content hasn’t just been replaced by Gibsonian tool content. And don’t get me wrong, that would be a wonderful first step in better characterizing what humans do, but I am also currently on a quest for a non-content description of neural activity -and resonance seems to fit that description.

There is some misreading of Ecological Psychology due to the way direct perception and information detection are spoken about. Direct perception seems to carry with it a connotation of specificity (guarantee), that the world is in the specific way it is seen, we cannot be wrong and we have all of it available at once. There is an explicit rejection of the poverty of the stimulus. But pause here a second, because this is what information detection is about.

First, the production of photons exist regardless of my existence. They will bounce around on surfaces, be partly absorbed/reflected depending on surface makeup, and create structure (if we were to put an observer somewhere in this space). In this instance, it would be most appropriate to simply refer to this as the optic array, or structured light. It is not that this structure carries content, it simply is structured (and continuously re-restructured) in a manner specific, and guaranteed, by the surfaces around it and the medium(s) by which it came to any specific point.

Second, for a very long time, organisms have grown to be able to detect such structures. I cannot remember the organism, I think it’s a deep water fish, but a precursor to our eyes was sensitive only to ‘light’ or nothing. Since, eyes seemed to catch on as an important way (in an evolutionary sense) to keep developing, which in our case meant becoming more and more sensitive to the structure that light carries with it. There is no reason to believe that at once, in any given slice of time, that we can perceive all of the structures that light carries with it. ‘We see what we see’ and if we want to see more, we have to explore whatever we are trying to see by moving, to literally detect structure that may be occluded to us from one vantage point (like “illusions”), or, we simply have not looked at something for enough time that we have yet to learn to discriminate between smaller differences in structure in the optic array. I can, in the end, come to the same or a different conclusion about what I saw, depending on the history with which I came into the situation, but also depending on which parts of the array I was detecting, or trying to detect, at the time.

Third, we see and hear and detect pressure and other things at the location at which that information is available (but as you might expect, we do not necessarily detect it, but, we have the possibility to). The firing of cells in the eye that propagate to the brain, never held content, and was always in a ‘language neutral’, ‘symbol neutral’, non-content “signal”.

However. Vicente Raja Galian pointed out that so far, I have yet to assign any function to the brain, and it seems appropriate that we should since it is a curious structure and we have kept it evolutionarily. Keeping a biological structure does not entail function or even importance (in the strictest interpretation of the word), but it seems to me to be a very valid point. So far, I am having issues arguing against that the brain is for ‘where’ (on/in the body) and ‘in what order’. Something is detected at the foot as intense pressure, I look down and see a dog biting it, this (in a sense) creates a loop where whatever signals are propagated back from the retina together with the pressure of the foot are happening simultaneously. There is simultaneous increased firing from two directions into the brain. Solely by being simultaneous in a close (geographically) space, intertwines the two. Experience does not happen in the brain, it happens in the relationship between body and environment, but one thing happening before, after or simultaneously, may come to be through having a space within a body where the ‘where and when’ co-exists. Because a lot of neural propagation going on in the body, in one way or another, travels to one collected structure, the brain. No content is needed, all we need to “know” is where and when, which is simply (although plastic) a matter of bodily geography.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the brain is for drawn-ness and repulsion, but that currently requires more thought and explication before I feel comfortable laying it out publically.

TL/DR: While a valid concern, I don’t think EcoPsych relies on ‘environmental’ content.

I share the worry with Dr. Edward Baggs, that Enactivist criticism of Ecological Psychology’s Direct Perception hints at a possible dualism -even if I think it may mostly arise from reading EcoPsych unfavourably or indeed unfavourably expressing EcoPsych.

The idea is this. Representationalists assume content is in the brain (created and/or passed on from the senses as input). Perception is simply input for the brain-processor which sends output signals to the passive body, hence Indirect Perception, what our eyes see is ultimately not what we experience, we experience what the brain creates (subject to criticism of being idealist and/or dualist, but that’s a different blog post). EcoPsych instead says, hang on, the world is its own best model, there is absolutely no need to conceptualize the perceptual system as mere, passive, input devices, and there is no need to conceptualize the brain as a processor -we need no processing (in the traditional sense anyways). Rather, perception is active and intelligent on its own, what you are currently experiencing is unmediated by any interpretational processes, what you experience is what your perceptual system detects. Perception requires movement, perception and action are in this sense inseparable (your legs, e.g., are also a part of seeing, cue embodied theories). However, importantly, perception is action, action is perception. It’s a continuous and simultaneous loop…

Enactivism asks however, if this means that EcoPsych simply places content on the outside, as opposed to representationalists on the inside. If so, we are not really losing the dualistic consequences that believing in content brings with it.

I think one problem may arrive from reading specificity (roughly: guaranteed perception) into Direct Perception. The straightforward answer here is that this is a bit too literal a take on Direct Perception, although it comes from considerations such that if what we see is the world then why does the world look different to different people -we have access to the same information. A simple answer from EcoPsych would be that firstly we all have different capabilities that we bring to any situation, we inhabit different bodies, we can have different goals, and they all bring effects on what we attend to and why.

Another issue is that some EcoPsych’s talk about properties and effectivities, as if you can divide up organism from environment, landing us in traditional dualisms again. I do not subscribe to this way of talking specifically about the organism or the environment because I think it too easily invites dualist interpretations -but those who do still would say the affordance is primary, that we then can talk about its corresponding parts doesn’t mean that they see them as non-constitutive. Which sounds fine to me, but, I also understand how people can misread this.

As for answering the central question of -do EcoPsychs conceptualize content to be on the outside, I think a resounding ‘no’ is in order. Organisms detect structure in ambient arrays (e.g. the optic array) and they perceive/act on affordances (which necessarily is a relational aspect of the current, and continuously evolving, organism-environment system). The information itself (the structure in an ambient array) is not content, in the case of vision it is (from a specific point of observation) all of the converging photons from all angles (as a whole, continuously flowing) on that point that has bounced off of surfaces where light has been partly absorbed, reflected, etc (which is part of how light becomes structured) that then reaches the eyes. The eyes themselves have evolved to detect differences in structure to the point that was necessary for survival, and we bring an entire cultural/societal/historical as well as developmental baggage with us as we have started naming structures that we are taught from young age to reproduce. But there is no content, there is no standing-in-for the things in the environment = a wooden table is made up of wooden particles which are made up of atoms, when light strikes the top of a dark wood, photons are to a larger degree than a light wood absorbed by the material, but then of course, this becomes circular because we have already defined “dark” and “light” through the property of absorption. (It should be added here that “illusions” where dark and light can look the same, or where a blue dress can look yellow, is only a valid counter-argument if you rely on traditional optics where you discount contextual factors like general lighting conditions etcetera.)

Going to CogSci17 in London this summer for my first research presentation, the paper is to be published in the proceedings (and can be found here). Here’s the abstract:

The actualization of affordances can often be accomplished in numerous, equifinal ways. For instance, an individual could discard an item in a rubbish bin by walking over and dropping it, or by throwing it from a distance. The aim of the current study was to investigate the behavioral dynamics associated with such metastability using a ball-to-bin transportation task. Using time-interval between sequential ball-presentation as a control parameter, participants transported balls from a pickup location to a drop-off bin 9m away. A high degree of variability in task-actualization was expected and found, and the Cusp Catatrophe model was used to understand how this behavioral variability emerged as a function of hard (time interval) and soft (e.g. motivation) task dynamic constraints. Simulations demonstrated that this two parameter state manifold could capture the wide range of participant behaviors, and explain how these behaviors naturally emerge in an under-constrained task context.

Are one of the lines longer, shorter or the same length as the other one?

Traditional psychology holds that perception is flawed, we see illusions because the underlying perceptual aspects of our experience need to be embellished, corrected, interpreted, etc, by our brain. While doing this we make mistakes. It is often posited as one of the major issues for ecological psychology to explain because it seems to invite cognition. After all, if all the information is detectable out in the environment, then why would we perceive the top line as shorter and the bottom one as longer?

Perceptual illusions in real life (not on paper or a screen) can quite easily be dealt with. We could argue that the we have not sampled enough of the available information in the ambient optic array, so we do that by locomotion and change of viewing angle. When we do, very many illusions are simply dispelled (Kennedy & Portal, 1990, or Michaels & Corello, 1981). In fact Michaels and Corello explains this very well; if we are in a desert, looking for water and see a mirage (which may or may not be water), it is right of us to investigate if it is or not, not doing so would be the wrong action to take. In the same way, they exemplify, could we be fooled by a hologram until we reach out to try and touch it.

Besides this point, the illusions that aren’t able to be dispelled by simply exploring, are always images or videos on a screen or paper. Making them in part unexplorable. As for the Müller-Lyer illusion, it is at the same time simple but abstract forms. All the information given is what is there, but even looking at it now, knowing they are the same length, I still perceive them as different lengths. A solution that has been suggested elsewhere (lost the reference sorry) is that the top figure shows an enclosing space, if we were to reach our hand in, we would be more constrained than the bottom figure. The information is specifying a smaller versus a larger space.

Another assumption of traditional psychology is that (visual) perception works with the simplest aspects, lines, points, and that then there is a constructive process cognitively that puts things together into more and more complex constructions of what we perceive (into the full 3d-experience of the world). For a traditionalist then, there is no doubt it is an illusion, the lines are the same length, we perceive them to be different -our brain is playing tricks with us. From an ecological standpoint, it is impossible not to see the four end lines, you can’t not perceive them when perceiving the end of the lines. Therefore, they matter.

It is fully possible that we actually don’t perceive the “simplest” form and construct it, in fact, this is what ecological psychology says we don’t do. The example comes from the Planimeter (Runeson). A mechanical, simple, device that can measure the area of irregular patches without knowing length, width or doing any computations. (For its full explanation, see here.) It thus measures a “higher order” thing, sqaure cm (or inch) without the “simpler” concepts. It is fully possible to conceive of the idea that we then simply cannot ignore the four end lines -they are not individual lines, they are a form that is important, in it’s whole, to our perception of it. For this reason, it may just be so that the question “Are one of the lines shorter, longer or the same length as the other?” a silly question to ask. Because our perceptual system does not work on simple structure and construction, it is forcing us to do something that we simply don’t do, and therefore do it poorly.

(Which unfortunately is not too uncommon in the traditional psychological literature.)

Even if we theorise there to be a universe contracting and expanding, or a Big Bang, it might be impossible to actually “see” it. The reason would be found in Ecological Psychology.

Only when Ambient Light has structure does it specify the environment. There has to be differences in different directions, for it to contain any information. Perfect symmetry, maximum entropy, is theorised to be a whole bunch of homogeniety in layout, distance between particles, etc. If we have a medium that is perfectly evenly distributed, we do not have difference. So how could we ever “see” it?

I had issues coming up with a title for this because it is only a tiny example I use when speaking with undergraduates (usually first-years) about the inadequacy of logic to account for human behaviour. I link it to Gigerenzer’s arguments on this matter.

If this example may be useful for you to use, awesome, otherwise; you can always use it to tire people out and make something easy more of a burden (for no reason at all, which is always a fun pastime).

Imagine a round pillar with four plaques in each cardinal direction, you are to read all four. You may choose to either; walk one cardinal direction clockwise for the entire procedure, or; three cardinal directions counter-clockwise for the entire procedure. However, regardless of which one you choose you would read the plaques, gaining the same information, in the same order. Logically, abstracted from the procedure, you walk away with the same information. Ecologically, obviously, they are different because movement is different. The larger the pillar, the larger the difference.

The point here can then be elaborated further upon depending on the exact idea you are wanting to teach. I find it quite useful for undergraduates, as for postgraduates however, the example is often too basic and Gigerenzer’s ‘Wason four-card task argument’ I find more useful.

If you have any fun techniques or examples you use to teach these ideas, please enrich the comment field!

A point of entry in the free will debate concerns Locke’s example (no reference I’m afraid, I’ve lost it) of a person entering a room, closing the door behind hier [ɪə]. In situation A hie [i:] just makes a decision to stay or leave, in situation B hie is unaware of the door locking behind hier. Now, my own take on this example is that it neatly shows subjective and objective ‘knowledge’ [and its impact on considering free will existent or not]. Hie makes a decision based on free will in the first case and hie only believes hie does in the second. From a subjective perspective there is free will, from an objective there isn’t.

Ecological Psychology does not like this at all. EcoPsy would probably decide that in both cases there is free will because perception, belonging to the observer, does not include the information that the door is locked. Or? EcoPsy is positioned with embodied, embedded and often extended cognition, including dynamicism. This would entail that movement and active exploration is an important aspect of being human. Therefore, the decision to stay in the room can either be classified as free will in both cases or defined a non-decision. The reason for the latter would be that, at that point in time, the perceiver has not actively explored the environment enough to be able to make the decision to begin with. Even a half-arsed exploration of hies [i:z] environment allows perception of which options are available. As I see it, the original example assumes naivité and passivity on part of the observer, and this is unfair.

The most important point however is that the original example also defines decision-making in a strict computational manner; at one point in time, without temporal perspective, in a very strict fashion. It does not take into consideration how we explore, find out and perceive in the real world -how decisions unfold over time and do not boil down to single points in time. In my perspective, there are several more philosophical examples that are conundrums simply because of the distinct connectionist/computationalist ignorance of temporal flow.

EP has given me a few thoughts about some issues I’ve had in philosophy. The first one being that of seeing the world in one’s subjective sense compared to an objective sense. This is often up for debate when discussing anything involving the question; what really happened? Because, as everyone will assure you of, their own subjective version of a story is the, at least more so, correct one. As many have found though, “truth” (considered using “truthiness” here… again… pass for now… again…), is often found somewhere in between the two accounts. So why is this important when involving EP and philosophy?

Well, roughly, social constructionism (SC) will tell you that both versions are correct and will, practically, end in some form of compromise (good) or further polarisation (not so good) of the two parties. There is no use in deciding which is more correct or delving deeper into the actual accounts, just that each version is correct in their own right because that was the experience of each of the two parties.

Critical realism (CR) will state that there was a reality to the situation but both accounts are skewed in each party’s own favour -so it would be necessary to try and extract an objective version out of the two subjective versions. Doing this, in my perspective, rather entails creating a third subjective perspective -more so than one being objective (however a side-note in my argument because it becomes important to define subjective and objective and what they entail and why I would define the third perspective as subjective rather than objective. However. As with much in philosophy, definitions aren’t clear cut and will most probably be a long and pointless discussion with exceptions to the rule).

Instead, what insight can EP give us into the practical application of philosophy in our lives? EP would focus on the perspective of each of the two accounts and validate both, like SC. However, with the addition of each perspective being unique, relying on the mechanisms of perception, there is some ground to actually state that they are both valid (unlike SC, which demands validity outright). The consequence here is that with EP one is allowed to reconcile the two perspectives on the same level as they are stated -CR here needs to abstract the two subjective versions to one objective version. I believe then, that due to the non-existence of an objective/subjective dichotomy -one is forced by EP to acknowledge the experience of both parties and look at cause and effect between the two accounts through the process of the situation as it unfolded. The to and fro, if you will. One is not forced to do this, if guided by either SC or CR. SC is too egalitarian and naive in its supposition and has a hard time consolidating two very different perspectives, especially when they are very specific. CR on the other hand entails the assumption that neither account holds the “correct” version as there is an objective version that is superior.

My conclusion then, is that EP doubles back into philosophy and gains us a fuller account of ‘what really happened’, gives more information about how a specific situation unfolded, and in turn, gives you more leads to use when attempting to resolve the dispute.

A first note; CR, I find, is used most often in everyday life and also most often works decently well. EP gives you an extra edge in all parts of the process however.

A secondary note; it is quite fun (and easy) to define, in any type of dispute in real life, what philosophical backdrop people use when resolving, maintaining or escalating a conflict. Every philosophical perspective has its merits and flaws and de-escalating a conflict can be quite an easy task if you can identify and practically use to your advantage the specific perspective taken by other parties. Add pedagogy and conflict de-escalation/resolution is within reach.

A last note; positivism is not brought up simply because at that level of abstraction (even further than CR), it is of even less help (than for example CR) -although, as has been written, each perspective has its merits and flaws, and are usable situationally.

A second last note; I miss teaching (and research, although I have available many journals), won’t this summer vacation ever end?